Best of ribbonfarm.com on Kiwi News
Most upvoted by Kiwi News readers
30 stories from ribbonfarm.com have been shared on Kiwi News since 14 July 2023, with 63 upvotes and 14 comments in total. The latest was shared on 11 October 2024. They are listed below, most upvoted first.
Text under a title is an AI summary of the linked article.
- Stack Map of the World
The world's technology stack rests on a fragile base that high-level AI and crypto discussions rarely consider. Most of the high-purity quartz needed for semiconductor equipment reportedly comes from one mine in North Carolina, and its production is a closely guarded trade secret known to only a handful of organizations. One guess is that China is close to figuring it out, and disrupting that mine or attacking shipping near Yemen could shut down much of the world. Satirical slogans such as "Decentralize the quartz mines!" accompany a stack diagram inspired by xkcd's Dependency cartoon.
- Decision Brownouts
The essay argues that today's hardest decisions often trigger a "decision brownout," a state where people freeze because a slow, chronic stress response gives them no clear threat to fight or flee and no energy to choose a new direction. Its author describes the symptoms as procrastination, clutter, and conserving energy by taking the path of least resistance. The author argues that getting out of a brownout requires energy more than direction, since making non-default choices is what unlocks energy. The essay also suggests that many people in such states are wrongly pathologized, and it applies the idea to the 2024 presidential choice, which it describes as de-energizing.
- The Future of the Blogosphere
The author argues that the blogosphere is aging and enshittifying at both the technical and cultural levels, and that its current political-economic flavor, which he calls blogospherism, is doomed in its present form. He describes a recent bug where UTF-8 characters appeared as garbled text on his blog, a problem caused by decades of accumulated legacy issues in WordPress and MySQL and fixed by Dorian Taylor with help from Artem Litvinovich. He argues that complex technologies inevitably decay regardless of their politics, and that new movements must reinvent foundations rather than start from values.
- Poison-Depilling Problems
Venkatesh Rao (no, the author isn't named in the text; the piece is unsigned in this excerpt) argues that writers should avoid "poison-pilled" terms, meaning useful ideas whose wording is tainted by political baggage, unsound analysis, or distasteful associations. The article cites two examples: "enshittification," coined by Cory Doctorow, and "luxury belief," coined by Rob Henderson. It says that qualifying these terms, challenging their provenance, or appropriating them with inverted valence each fails, so it proposes coining new terms instead. The alternatives it offers are "favela gothic," for enshittification, and "referred chauvinism," for luxury beliefs, with the author noting these are not claimed to be great terms.
- Ribbonfarm is Retiring
Venkatesh Rao announces that his blog Ribbonfarm, active since 2007, will fully retire on November 13, 2024, his 50th birthday, after which it will become a static museum-style archive with its domain and links kept active. He argues that the blogosphere and public social media era are ending, with the cozyweb, a more private and intimate online culture, taking their place. He ties the blog's 2007-2024 span to the Global Financial Crisis and the 2024 US presidential election, and attributes much of the blog's reach to low interest rates and cheap free distribution, which he says ended as platforms began charging for distribution.
- A big little idea called legibility
James C. Scott's book Seeing Like a State argues that a recurring failure pattern in large-scale projects stems from a desire for "legibility," meaning a simplified, readable order that is imposed on complex realities. Scott describes the thinking behind this failure as "authoritarian high modernism," and the blog author presents it as a recipe that starts with misreading complexity as irrationality. The book's examples include German "scientific" forestry, which replaced diverse wild forests with monoculture stands measured only by acreage, yield and market value, and planned cities such as Brasilia and Chandigarh. The text also suggests that the urge to impose order may be driven by anxiety about apparent chaos.
- Imagination vs. Creativity
Imagination and creativity are distinct: imagination reasons forward from a current state to possibilities already known to be reachable, while creativity reasons backward from desired outcomes to build new possibilities. Donny Chen's Lego dragon, built from 6500-7000 pieces and about 2 meters long, is cited as showing far more of both than the simpler models described. Bug-fixing is described as typically imaginative but rarely creative, since one missing Matlab apostrophe took about 5-6 hours to find and 5 seconds to fix. The text claims AI can currently fake imagination but not creativity, though it sees no fundamental barrier.
- Bangalore Meetup Report
The author reports on the first ribbonfarm meetup in India, held last night in Bangalore and organized by Abhishek Agarwal, with about 20 attendees including startup and corporate tech people. The group spent the evening on topics other than the election, which the author found surprising given the insular India they had left in 1997. The author also describes how the blog's readers have made personal print editions of ebook-only works and essay collections, and says the author's content is licensed for non-commercial print use.
- There Is No Antimemetics Division by qntm
Blogger Gwern-style reviewer (the author, unnamed in the text) recommends There Is No Antimemetics Division (2020) by qntm, a novel about agents of a bureaucratic organization called The Foundation who track dangerous "antimemetic" entities, ideas that discourage their own spread. The book grew out of SCP, an online experimental fiction community whose contributors write in dry bureaucratic-reporting language about invented containment-worthy objects. The text describes the novel's style as a mix of Lovecraftian cosmic horror, Ballardian banality and near-Douglas-Adams camp, and it credits Simon De La Rouviere's talk on SCP for the Summer of Protocols as a useful way to understand the community.
- The Dark Forest Marketing Agency
This short fiction follows a narrator's 15-minute virtual consultation with Pasha7, an AI twin representing the human marketing expert Ibrahim Pasha, after paying 0.05 ETH. The narrator is told that the advice is to avoid marketing entirely and design a product that is hard to discover, based on a "Dark Forest" theory drawn from Cixin Liu's science fiction. The Pasha describes "Cixin goods," whose marketing value per unit of random attention is negative, and says that a product should be shown only in contexts so high-trust that they market themselves. The narrator never receives the promised follow-up.
- BDFxing, Or Post-Charismatic Distributed Leadership
- Going Sessile
Travel has become unappealing beyond local weekend getaways, and trips are now worth making only for genuine novelty or when someone else pays for a managed experience. The same friction-versus-novelty logic is said to apply to music tastes, reading, political openness and tolerance for weather. The text says its own window for wandering ran from about 1998 to 2018, and that money can suppress friction only up to about 80, so longevity tech appears to demand more time and energy than the return justifies. It calls the trend not a good thing, though it sometimes resists it.
- Economics Memes
The author argues that economics should be shaped by sociological and technological narratives rather than left to economists, whose debates on specific data tend to end inconclusively. Trickle-down theory is cited as a failed meme whose narrative is undermined by a series of counterpoints, such as labor's share of wealth creation falling while quality of life improved in other ways. The proposed strategy is to introduce new, less-captured economic memes, such as the hypothetical "swirl-around theory," which the author says was made up for illustration, before economists capture the discourse. The author also presents AI investment as a top-level technology bet, while noting that GPUs are hard to buy and Nvidia stock is already high.
- Protocol Entrepreneurship
The author announces the second Summer of Protocols program for the Ethereum Foundation, which will award five Protocol Improvement Grants (PIGs) of 90k to teams of two working for four months on improving a real-world protocol. The program aims to cultivate "protocol entrepreneurship" as a learnable capability. A live information session is planned for next Wednesday at 9 AM Pacific, and a separate PILLs program offers 20 grants of $1000 for creative works that might "protocol pill" people. The team includes Tim Beiko, Josh Davis, Timber Schroff and Jenna Dixon.
- Civilizational Functionalism
The essay argues that civilization should be understood through function rather than Purpose, a religious or progress-based narrative that it says is unfalsifiable and self-soothing. It contrasts purpose, which carries a presumed positive valence, with function, which carries none. Using Buckminster Fuller's Spaceship Earth as a functionalist frame, the author argues that the approach avoids moral presumption while still supporting action, and compares it to the Taoist farmer parable and Carse's infinite game.
- Harberger Tax
A blog post by Steve Randy Waldman, as quoted in this discussion, presents the Harberger tax as a way to address NIMBYism and artificially low property tax rates. Under the scheme, owners would declare a price at which they commit to sell the property and pay a legislatively set percentage of that price as tax, so the price they declare limits what alternative users would have to pay to gain access. The post notes that Posner and Weyl describe essentially the same scheme in Property is Only Another Name for Monopoly, tracing it to a 1965 paper by Arnold Harberger. The author notes the idea is growing in popularity in the Ethereum world, and the author sees it as a mathematically grounded alternative to the ideological split over land-value taxation.
- Truth-Seeking Modes
This post argues that the healthiest way to relate to a truth-seeking impulse is as an infinite game, where the aim is to keep playing rather than reach a definitive "winning" answer. The author says trivial truths may have win conditions, but interesting truths cannot be won and can only be healthily engaged because they keep producing new salient novelty. A healthy relationship to a suspected truth is described as a dynamic equilibrium among three forces, with every unbalanced configuration counted as unhealthy. The author ties this to an earlier idea from a newsletter on cozytech, "individually delusional, collectively rational," and suggests the arrangement shows a less deluded disposition emerging from more deluded parts, which the author calls a reliable gestalt subjectivity built from unreliable component subjectivities.
- Intellectual Menopause
John Ransom is probably the clearest case of "intellectual menopause," a phrase first used by H. L. Mencken in 1917 about Theodore Dreiser's *The "Genius."* Ransom's essay "Regenerate but Unrepentant," in the 1930 Southern Agrarian manifesto *I'll Take My Stand*, is judged a hot mess of shoddy history and wishful thinking, though its prose is elegant. Michael O'Brien's 2019 article says Ransom reached an intellectual menopause in his early forties, after his poetry dried up, with only seven of his 168 poems written or published after early 1927.
- Covid and Noun-Memory Effects
The author, who had a mild Covid infection in late 2022, reports persistent difficulty remembering proper nouns, especially names of actors, authors and not-too-close friends and family, while recall of TV character names and other memory types seems unaffected. Brain fog and fatigue from the infection faded after four to six months, but the noun-recall problem has continued. The author's working hypothesis is that long-term recall of low-emotional-salience narratives has eroded, and that proper nouns suffer most because they have no connection to the content being recalled. The author also suspects this has reduced the use of specific proper nouns in writing, and says some Bluesky and Farcaster users reported similar symptoms.
- News from the Universe
The author, who saw auroras in the Seattle area, argues that events like this are rare examples of news from the universe and that humanity has not yet registered on the rest of the universe. He lists four extraplanetary news events in just under 50 years: auroras in 2024, Betelgeuse dimming in 2019, the 'Oumuamua visit in 2017, and Shoemaker-Levy 9 crashing into Jupiter in 1994. He estimates a typical human life brings about 7 such events, and says the auroras were weather news rather than headline cosmic news. He also notes that NASA runs a space weather service with 30-minute updates.
- The Dark Forest Anthology of the Internet
The Dark Forest Anthology of the Internet, edited by Kickstarter cofounder Yancey Strickler, collects essays on the Dark Forest idea of the internet, led by Strickler's essay The Dark Forest Theory of the Internet. It also includes a contributor's May 2019 essay that coined the term "cozyweb" and referenced Strickler's piece. The book is published by Metalabel, Strickler's new venture, and its first printing sold out within a week. The contributors now form a metalabel artists' collective that plans to publish more work under the Dark Forest label.
- Storytelling — Philosophical Stakes
Michael Arndt argues that a story's philosophical stakes, the moral or metaphysical question it turns on, are what separate good endings from great ones and constitute the story's meaning. The author applies this to Jurassic Park, arguing it is about dinosaurs rather than Alan Grant's relationship with children, as Matthew Dicks's stakes-based model would suggest. The author's example is that the series finale, Jurassic World: Dominion, treats a world with wild dinosaurs as normal and makes saving that world the philosophical stake. The article also argues that most personal stories have few philosophical stakes.
- History is More Like Science Fiction Than Fantasy
The author argues that history is closer in kinship to science fiction than to fantasy, because good history, like science fiction, assumes one lawful universe that applies equally to everyone, with no Chosen Ones. Drawing on Ted Chiang's distinction between the two genres, the piece contends that explanations invoking "greatness" or specialness are unsatisfying and that hagiography is the history-writing equivalent of fantasy. The piece uses Bettany Hughes' Istanbul: A Tale of Three Cities as an example, noting that its account does not rest on the presumed greatness of figures such as Alexander, Catherine and Suleyman.
- Storytelling — Just Add Dinosaurs
Stories with dinosaurs are about the dinosaurs, not the character changes that Matthew Dicks treats as the essence of a story. Dicks reads Jurassic Park as the story of Alan Grant shifting from disliking children to liking them, with the dinosaurs as "just stakes." The same pattern holds in Doctor Who, where companions repeatedly choose cosmic adventure over human-scale love, and their human partners and families mostly serve as punchlines. Character arcs are structural scaffolding, and the cosmic stakes give them their intensity.
- My Post-AI Writing
The author says AI has indirectly changed their writing by lowering their craftsmanship standards, and that they now treat text as an intermediate product that readers can process with AI. They argue that writing is for them mainly a way of thinking things through, and that polishing for readers is secondary work they enjoy less. They note that they now write more, that they keep doing careful finishing for paid work, and that they expect AI to help with fiction, where they would supply an incomplete draft for readers to adapt.
- Matter and Life
The author argues that life is a major force shaping matter rather than a fragile exception to it, and that this macro-scale balance between living and non-living processes deserves philosophical attention. Half of the material variety on Earth is connected to life, according to the Quanta article on minerals, and the Nature article finds that global human-made mass exceeds all living biomass. The author also argues that the materials of the built environment, including concrete, asphalt, glass and metals, are shaped by life, and that this matters for climate action and computing.
- Can Robots Whittle?
Venkatesh Rao, writing on Ribbonfarm Lab, explains that he bought a $34 beginner whittling kit instead of a $149 Oak-D Lite AI camera, partly to pursue older, low-profile technologies rather than frontier gadgets. He argues that much technology progress comes from people chasing curiosities that have nothing to do with current hot problems, with breakthroughs often coming from ideas abandoned years or centuries earlier. Whittling, he notes, may be the oldest engineering activity, and he plans to learn it by carving a spoon and then a rabbit sculpture from the kit's bass wood blocks.
- 2023 Ribbonfarm Extended Universe Roundup
Venkatesh Rao reviews 2023 across his Ribbonfarm blog, his Ribbonfarm Studio Substack newsletter, his books and his social media, arguing that the public social web has largely retreated into smaller, less visible spaces. He reports that Ribbonfarm had only 16 posts in 2023, about one a month, compared with two a week in 2007-08, and that the Ribbonfarm Studio newsletter published 45 issues, two-thirds of them on the serialized projects Protocol Narratives and Mediocre Computing. He says he has effectively stepped back from building reach on social platforms and from media promotion, and that The Art of Gig, published in 2022, has modest sales because he lacked the bandwidth to market it.
- Touching Transistors
The author, returning to hobby electronics after a long break, describes building a 555-timer LED blinker and a set of simple logic circuits, arguing that working with discrete parts and no code builds a deeper literacy than microcontroller-based projects. Recounting a childhood in small-town India in the 1980s, they say a lack of parts, reference material and knowledgeable mentors ended their first attempt, while a lab course in the US and, more recently, ChatGPT helped them progress. They describe their electronics literacy as moving from roughly the level of their Spanish to that of their Tamil, and they plan to work next on Zener diodes, Darlington pairs and op-amps.
- Vastness
Vastness is the region beyond ordinary normalcy on the thinkability map, an effable but increasingly unnameable expanse of detail that cannot be conceptualized in any general way. J. G. Ballard's Drowned World and H. P. Lovecraft's fiction are cited as examples, with Ballard's characters sinking out of normalcy into deep time after external conditions trigger it. Unnameability is described as a mundane property of any experienceable thing with more incompressible detail than can be named, and even in a discrete, countable universe, practically unnameable detail remains.